Joe’s Biscotti Recipe
This post is a plug for a wonderful project my dear friend Amanda is working on as part of the Brooklyn Utopias exhibition, opening tomorrow night at The Brooklyn Historical Society. It features the recipe for her father’s biscotti, the results of which I have had, and are legendary:
Sauerkraut Among Us
So. Do you like sauerkraut? I mean — have you given homemade sauerkraut a chance in your adult life?
I was reintroduced to the stuff when I lived with a roommate in Boston who was, according to a friend, “like a Level 10 vegan.” Vegan roommate, an excellent cook, used to pack red cabbage in jars and let them ferment in a cabinet, adding the finished product to sandwiches and rice dinners and other things. It was good sauerkraut, not creepy like the unmonitored vats at a hot dog stand, and I could see that it was very easy to make. (It is easy on the level of doing your own laundry.)
Not long after I found a terrific fanzine called Wild Fermentation that teaches one how to make their own sauerkraut. It also teaches one how to make cheese, or tempeh, or tej or yogurt or pickles and other fermented foods. It has since been turned into a book but you can still find the stunningly simple recipe for sauerkraut here. Thank you, Sandor Ellix Katz, a.k.a. Sandor Kraut, for making your passion so accessible to us.
SCOBYs and Subscribers
Today I had some fun with my sister and her friend canning peaches for the Long, Hard, Cold California Winter. We had lots of extra peach-infused sugar syrup left over and I took some home to use in the making of a new batch of kombucha. Turns out I have a few extra SCOBYs that someone out there might want for a starter. If you’re in the Bay Area, and you’re lookin’, give me a call.
Also I’d like to point out a shift in my subscription services, which’ll now be hosted by FeedBurner instead of WordPress. I’d like to gently urge all my kind subscribers, old and new, to sign up for email or RSS updates via the links on that right hand column over there.
I’m having some change-in-site-design feelings, and decided to switch to this very minimal theme until I can manufacture the appearance of my dreams. ‘Til then I’ll be hanging loose, posting new stuff and updating old recipes with pictures. Pictures!
Pear Upside-Down Cake
This is one of my most favorite everyday cakes, since it is reasonably simple to prepare and it includes two of my most favorite flavors, pears and cardamom. I first made this cake at my sister’s house where I pulled the recipe from one of her cookbooks; I then copied the recipe onto the back of a receipt or something similarly scrappish and promptly lost it in a pile of paper; and then I rediscovered it today while cleaning off my desk. The thing is that I didn’t write down whose recipe it is or what book it came from, so if there are any sleuths out there who can clue me in to its origin, please do. Otherwise we’ll all just have to wait until I go to see my sister again.
It is called “Buttermilk Country Cake” and I am positive it is from a Maida Heatter-influenced cookbook. I made a Pear Upside-Down Cake using an actual Maida Heatter buttermilk cake recipe for a dinner party in Alaska, and it was just not the same. For starts, the M. H. version was enormous in comparison, like double-size the progeny’s version, and for seconds, it was a bit drier and tougher (though for that I’ll point to my probable overbeating of batter. M. H. is not to be messed with). The recipe I have for you here is moist-er than the popular Gourmet Magazine buttermilk cake recipe floating about online. For me, it is just right.
Oyster Pie
About an hour after arriving in Valdez, and less than 24 hours after arriving in Alaska, I received an invitation to spend the night on a fishing boat in Prince William Sound. My dear friend Sandra, on hiatus from the Harvard Peabody Museum, has been spending her summer working at the Valdez Museum and I took her up on the offer to visit. She’d borrowed a minivan from her friend Neal to pick me up in Anchorage, where my flight got in at eleven-thirty at night. Upon arrival I noticed the visible station of the sun and a quantity of handsomely taxidermied animals positioned about the airport, and felt certain that I’d landed in a different place.
A Pilgrim’s Progress
Don’t worry, this post isn’t going to include a recipe for “Untouched Chicken Salad Sandwich” or something equally mawkish. I just happened to read my old teenage fave on a long bus trip recently and couldn’t help but laugh about its fine details and the way in which I took its perceived message straight to heart when I was younger. There is something slightly chiropractic about reading books that once seemed so deeply private and personal as a yearning kid when you are all grown up and grumpy. At least this one ages fantastically well, if you can’t tell at least by the way my current writing style sucks up to it. Really though, communing with the Glass family again reminds me how cheap and exploitative douchey lame Wes Anderson films are. Do you hear what I’m saying, buddy?
Hmm. Enough of this critical foofery for the time being. I just spent last night on a boat! And in a day or two, I’ll have a groovy recipe for some of the fruits de la mer we collected whilst sailing the seas of Our Great 49th State.
Postscript 8/29/09: It was a very hot day today for San Francisco, and I was walking from one cool covered place to another when I found The Way of a Pilgrim propped up against a drainpipe not too far from the corner of 23rd & Folsom. A funny coincidence, that this little brown book should find its way into my hands less than a month after re-reading F & Z.
Pissaladiere & Rancho Gordo Beans & Brown Rice
Last night’s food. The pissaladière recipe I used from Clotilde’s blog was fairly lo-fi, but now I’m hooked and look forward to searching out more recipes and perfecting my own. (Am particularly interested in making my own pissalat.) I do love onions. Onions 4-eva.
Annnd… beans and rice for the week. What you have heard about Rancho Gordo beans is true: they are amazing, creamy, pillowy, luscious bits of beany perfection. Seriously, the beans you have probably been eating thus far in your life are hardly beans at all when compared to these guys. These beans will blow the minds of people who don’t like beans! I feel especially lucky since I can buy them in bulk at Rainbow, but for those of you who can’t access that co-op or the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market, do buy them online. WORTH IT.
Last night’s beans were Christmas Lima Beans soaked & cooked with brown rice in a mirepoix. Simple and spot-on. I also have the Vaqueros and Santa Maria Pinquitos to try later this week, and have a vision of wrapping up roasted chiles, nopales, tomatoes, onions, and cumin seeds with some epazote-seasoned beans in a tortilla or two. It’s great to feel back into my food after having been out of it for a few weeks.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gnocchi
Today was Mariquita Farms Mystery Box day, and today’s selection included a bag of Yukon Gold potatoes and basil and little bitty cucumbers and Pimiento de Padron peppers, among other things. A friend was coming over for dinner, so I decided to put a little something together. But what?
I wanted to use that basil ASAP. I don’t buy basil, since it usually comes in huge quantities that languish in my crisper long after I use what I need, and this bunch was too good to go to waste. And the potatoes — am I really in the mood for potatoes? Somehow my brains came up with the terrific idea of a cold potato salad with basil pesto called I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gnocchi. Because, like, you know, gnocchi are made with potatoes? And this is just like gnocchi, only way simpler and, um, not like gnocchi at all? Well, it’s still really good. I bet Fabio would endorse it.
Kitchens I Have Loved: Rose Geranium Peach Pie
This will be the first in a series of writings about places that I’ve cooked in and their related recipes. Because I’ve moved from one place to another quite a bit over the years, I’ve become handy at making food in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar tools. A few kitchen implements have made it through many transitions, but mostly, I’ve learned to make do with what’s at hand — without things like measuring tools, frying pans, baking sheets, sieves, sharp knives, microwaves & toasters, mixers, and the like. It’s nice to fetishize cooking equipment, but such things really aren’t necessary to make good food. For that, you’ll surely need decent ingredients and a bit of skill, but really good food requires good reception — friends and family to eat with. The kitchen is where the action is in a home!
